"We report, you decide."
That's the slogan of Fox News. It's baloney, of course. Fox is probably the most biased of all mainstream news outlets. But Fox has been successful -- at least in part, I'm convinced -- because more and more people want biased news, no matter how much they protest to the contrary.
Actually, let me rephrase that slightly. I think a growing number of people -- still a minority, thank God, but a growing number nonetheless -- don't really want unbiased, straightforward news reporting. When they complain about bias, what they're really complaining about, whether they're on the left or the right, is that the news isn't biased in favor of their side of the argument.
Too many people these days are intellectually lazy. They don't want to sort through conflicting reports, often presented in a relatively dry, factual fashion, to figure out what's important and who's right in any news-making scenario.
They want pre-packaged news -- news presented in small, entertaining bites and delivered with edge, with attitude (which, for much of the day's news, means a particular viewpoint, a partisan or ideological bias).
That helps explain why television offerings as different as Fox News and "The Daily Show" on the Comedy Channel are so popular. Granted, there are significant differences in the two beyond their right/left split -- only "The Daily Show" is intentionally funny, for example -- but you can watch either and come away feeling informed, entertained and confirmed in your world view, all with a minimum of intellectual effort.
"Everybody wants to be entertained by the news," says Todd Gitlin, a professor of sociology and journalism in the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. "Most people want no-problem news, goes-down-easy news, Yahoo! headlines, news that evokes feelings, even if those feelings are feelings of fear."
I think young people -- those in their late teens and 20s -- are particularly susceptible to these one-sided, half-baked news mcnuggets. Thanks to MTV, and instant messaging and other rapid-fire features of the Internet, most young people today want everything in quick, small bites. They get their news -- to the extent that they get any -- inadvertently, almost by osmosis, absorbing bits of it on various websites or between the radio play of their favorite songs or while clicking the television remote control.
